VGA arbiter support for Intel HD?

[Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@redhat.com>]

Hi,

I'm trying to add support for device assignment of PCI VGA devices with
VFIO and QEMU.  For normal, discrete discrete graphics the Linux VGA
arbiter works fairly well, disabling VGA on one bridge and adding it to
another (though I wish all the kernel VGA drivers made use of it).  The
i915 driver only seems to support disabling VGA on really old GMCH
devices (see intel_modeset_vga_set_state).  This means that if I boot
with IGD as the primary graphics and attempt to assign a discrete
graphics device, all the VGA range accesses are still routed to IGD, I
end up getting some error messages from the IGD interrupt handler, and
the discrete card never initializes.

I spent some time looking through the Sand Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and
Haswell datasheets, and I'm a bit concerned whether the hardware even
provides a reasonable way to disable VGA anymore.  Quoting 2.17 from the
Haswell docs:

        Accesses to the VGA memory range are directed to IGD depend on
        the configuration.  The configuration is specified by:
              * Internal graphics controller in Device 2 is enabled
                (DEVEN.D2EN bit 4)
              * Internal graphics VGA in Device 0 Function 0 is enabled
                through register GGC bit 1.
              * IGD's memory accesses (PCICMD2 04 – 05h, MAE bit 1) in
                Device 2 configuration space are enabled.
              * VGA compatibility memory accesses (VGA Miscellaneous
                Output register – MSR Register, bit 1) are enabled.
              * Software sets the proper value for VGA Memory Map Mode
                register (VGA GR06 Register, bits 3-2). See the
                following table for translations.

(There's a similar list for VGA I/O range)  I've found that if I disable
memory and I/O in the PCI command register for IGD then I do get VGA
routing to the PEG device and the discrete VBIOS works.  This obviously
isn't a good option for the VGA arbiter since it entirely disables IGD.

The GGC registers aren't meant for runtime switching and are actually
locked.  Disabling IGD via the device 2 enable bit doesn't seem like and
option.  I don't quite understand the VGA miscellaneous output register
and VGA memory map mode, but the table provided for the latter makes me
think they just augment the VGA ranges and don't disable them.

Is it possible to support the VGA arbiter with the latest IGD?  Is
anyone working on it?  Thanks,

Alex

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